China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl

language was to be a class attribute rather than a national one. Ultimately Qu’s radically democratic advocacies were dropped from discussion.

      With the successive arrival of radio, recordings, talkie cinema, popular music, and other modes of sound reproducibility, the question of language and form continually (re)imposed itself as a political, social, and market problem. It also became completely intertwined with the intractable issue of the written form itself, the hanzi (, characters) that were distinctive to China’s historic expressive system. European language experts, who, through the nineteenth century, had come up with immutable (colonial) taxonomies of world languages, had long since decided that China was hampered by the hanzi form of writing, and that this “pictographic” or “ideographic” form could never be flexible enough to express modern thinking or conceptual matters properly. On this view, Chinese were imprisoned in and by nonalphabetic backwardness. After considering and discarding Esperanto as a possible solution, Chinese language experts in part accepted European theories and tried over many decades to find an adequate linguistic logic for the transformation and/or simplification of hanzi: using alphabetic equivalents, inventing new pronunciation symbols and guides, and ultimately reducing the number of strokes required for the writing of any given character (the 1950s PRC solution to the problem). With the telegraph and then the advent of computers, the issue was rejoined from yet other angles.¹⁰

      The difficulty of writing/reading in the process of learning redounded immediately to the sphere of education and textbooks. The explosive expansion of schools and literacy helped to redefine the purpose of education. From a tool of gentility, good breeding, or male access to state power, education for boys and girls became, on the one hand, a form of training for individual fulfillment and/or creating activists to lead the fight for social justice; on the other hand, as education came under the control of agents of a would-be state and the conservative forces of textbook publishing, it became a way to produce citizens as patriots and servants of a putative (still nonexistent) national state. Grammar texts became one key to producing whatever sense of citizenry could be wrought from the disunified territorial whole. Meanwhile, emulating Germany and Japan, physical education was incorporated into the new-style schools, based on the conviction that the old separation of effete scholarship (wen / ) from brawny military pursuits (wu / ) was outmoded and inimical to an all-round ideal militarized citizen of the nation. Even the young Mao Zedong was captivated by the practice of physical exercise, although he was hugely critical of the mechanical, rote way in which it was taught in schools.¹¹

      Thus it was that from the earliest phases of the New Culture movement’s calls for a radical transformation in language, literary form, and the social purpose of culture, the issues raised went to the core of how “Chinese” or “Chinese-ness” was to be practiced, inculcated, experienced, and understood in modern terms. Over the course of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, these issues were repeatedly debated and re-raised, in ever-deeper and ever more expanded form. They remain at issue today.

      In late 1917, the Russian Revolution did not wash across Chinese radical circles in a wave of clarity. In the immediate aftermath, the October Revolution was understood as a “victory of anarcho-communism.”¹² Indeed, through the 1910s and well into the 1920s, the major language of radicalism in China was that of anarchism: Peter Kropotkin’s mutual aid, Leo Tolstoy’s agrarian utopianism, Mikhail Bakhunin’s laborism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s collectivism, Emma Goldman’s radical feminism, Daoist eremetism, and of course, with even less theoretical rigor, various advocacies for assassination and nihilism. There was little to distinguish Bolshevism or Marxism from anarchism as an anti-state and pro-labor form of socialism.¹³ It was only in late 1918 through 1919 that the various “isms” started to get separated out and elaborated more clearly in relation to one another. Yet even as the intellectual scene was muddled, Chinese state agents and foreign authorities were not confused about the potential dangers of the revolutionary appeal of Russia; large numbers of journals, whether merely liberal or more radical, were shut down while what was called “Bolshevist” activity was sought so as to be rooted out of foreign concession areas. Most of the captured activists were in fact anti-Bolshevist anarchists, but that mattered to no one in power.

      By late 1918, Li Dazhao, a professor at Beijing University and soon to be one of the founders of the CCP along with Chen Duxiu, was lauding the victory of Bolshevism in Russia in the pages of the quintessential journal of the time, New Youth (Xin Qingnian / ); by 1919 he was writing more about Marx and Marxism than Bolshevism. Meanwhile, Qu Qiubai, temporarily sidetracked from politics by a love of the Russian language and nineteenth-century Russian literature, was called upon to translate Russian political tracts and to participate in the new Beijing University–based Marxist Research Society reading groups. In these groups, basic tenets of Marxism and Bolshevism were discussed with reference to a meager number of translated texts. By early 1920, Qu was sent by the Beijing Morning Post to Moscow to report directly on the Russian revolution and its messy aftermath. His travelogue, History of the Heart in the Red Capital (Chi du xin shi / ), published in 1922, was rigorous in its reflections on the promise and problems in postrevolutionary Russia; for its honesty, it has been called “one of the most influential pieces of ‘red propaganda’ ever written.”¹⁴

      When confronted from an anarchist perspective, several of the difficult aspects of an acceptance of Bolshevism/Marxism included the prominence accorded by Bolshevism to a centralized disciplined party in the organization and leadership of political and ideological activity, as well as the centrality given in Marxism to the inevitability of class struggle and the victory of the proletariat in the era of industrial capitalism. On the latter issue, anarchists tended to see things in the binary terms of authority/non-authority, where authority was embedded not merely in state / society or class antagonisms, but also in families, the cultural realm, everyday routines, labor regimes of all varieties, gender relations, and so on. Thus, unlike liberals, who believed China’s social structure did not have class conflict but was merely backward (as compared to Euro-America-Japan), anarchists saw class, but could not accept it as the primary way through which people lived their social subordination. Moreover, anarchists could not accept that an authoritarian institution such as the party or the state could be used to transform social relations in an equitable direction. The mismatch between ends (social justice) and means (state or party authority) was too great. This, then, led them to suspect that the discipline of a centralized Bolshevist party, whose role was to coordinate activity and police acceptable ideological parameters of political understanding, would lead to the imposition of the party over social and political life more generally. In their refusal to accept these premises, anarchists, through the 1920s, became anathema to the CCP, and the party—once formed—diligently purged them from the ranks, as had Lenin in postrevolutionary Russia.